At some point—it is not clear exactly when—Jerome Asaro’s criminal propensities earned him the distinction of induction into what was originally known as the Bonanno crime family. He also had another business, a junkyard in East New York, which seemed to work out better than the clothing store. Jerome did a good job of staying out of public light until January 1970 when he and thirteen other men were charged as part of a Nassau County grand jury investigation with organized-crime activity. The district attorney for the county, William Cahn, had discovered that the Mob was using his county as a focal point for its activity and fired up a grand jury probe that seemed to be focused on gambling. There were some interesting names indicted along with Jerome Asaro, who at that point had an address in the city of Long Beach and was traveling in some very good company Mafia-wise. Charged was Salvatore “Sally The Shiek” Musacchio, at one time a former underboss of the old Mafia family run by olive oil king Joseph Profaci; Sebastian “Buster” Aloi, a captain in the Colombo crime family; Pasquale “Paddy Mack” Macchiarole, a reputed soldier in the Colombo borgata; Salvatore Ferrugia, a Bonanno soldier known by the moniker “Sally Fruits” and who a decade later would be appointed temporary caretaker of the Bonanno family by the Mafia commission as the crime clan suffered through the incarceration of official boss Philip Rastelli.
There was also another man, younger than the others at age thirty-two, who was charged with possession of gambling records. He was identified as Henry Hill and lived in Island Park, a community near the water in Nassau County. Not much else was widely known about Hill at that time. Later, that would change dramatically with his involvement with the Burke gang and the Lufthansa heist.
Jerome Asaro reached the rank of soldier in what newspapers called the Sciacca crime family, which was just another name for the Bonanno family. It was Paul Sciacca, with the Commission’s approval, who took over the crime family after family patriarch Joseph Bonanno was forced to leave New York in the late 1960s following a war among its members and disgust with his imperious, high-handed manner of leadership. But while law enforcement was paying attention to the problems created by Bonanno, as well as the other crime families, Jerome Asaro remained relatively low key. His name didn’t appear in any of the congressional or Department of Justice lists circulated about Mafia members at the time, but he was clearly considered a member of the mob.
Jerome’s son Vincent didn’t do much in his early years to separate himself from his father’s life of crime. Beginning in 1957 at the age of twenty-one, Vincent Asaro started getting arrested for all sorts of crimes: rape, burglary, bank robbery, kidnapping, felonious assault, and weapons possession. Records show that a lot of those cases were dismissed. But in 1960 a petty larceny arrest and a charge of unlawful entry led to convictions for what were relatively minor offenses. Asaro added to his record in 1967 with a conviction for assault in the third degree, again a relatively minor crime.
Vincent started to have more serious trouble when he reached age forty-four. Then, a 1970 federal arrest led to a conviction for theft from interstate commerce and a sentence of five years’ probation, the time for which had not expired when he got arrested for burglary of a post office. The burglary arrest led in 1972 to a federal conviction and six months in prison, to be served on weekends.
Vincent’s federal convictions didn’t keep him off the street, and he gravitated to the well-known mob bar called Robert’s Lounge at 114-45 Lefferts Boulevard in South Ozone Park. The saloon was run by Jimmy Burke and became the place where Burke held court and planned his own crimes with a crew of mob associates—a group of killers, hijackers, cigarette smugglers, credit card scammers, overall thieves, and assorted outlaws that included Henry Hill, Tommy DeSimone, Angelo Sepe, Robert McMahon, and many others. The bar was not far—about fifteen minutes—from John F. Kennedy Airport, a favorite target for their thievery.
Robert’s Lounge also had a dark reputation. As Hill would later recount in a memorable scene to writer Nick Pileggi in Wiseguy, one night DeSimone, an out-of-control, sadistic murderer, started picking on a young man named “Spider,” the club waiter. DeSimone wanted Spider to dance and shot at his feet, wounding him. Vincent Asaro, who happened to be in the club that night, took the injured Spider to a doctor for first aid. But that didn’t stop things with DeSimone.
“One night we are playing cards in the cellar—Tommy, Jimmy, me, Anthony Stabile, Angelo Sepe, when Spider walks in,” recalled Hill. “All of a sudden Tommy wants him to dance. ‘Do a dance,’ Tommy says. For some reason Spider tells Tommy to go fuck himself.”
The others started teasing DeSimone around the card table and finally an increasingly angry DeSimone, baited by his friends’ taunts, pulls out a handgun and shoots Spider in the chest three times, killing him, remembered Hill. It was a brutal scene immortalized in GoodFellas, and from that moment on Hill decided DeSimone was a psychopath.
After a moment of stunned silence, an angry Burke chastised DeSimone about the mess he had made and ordered him to dig a hole right in the basement of the club and bury Spider’s body, said Hill. Many years later police would dig in the basement of Robert’s Lounge in search of remains of Spider and other victims Hill told them were buried there but found nothing, save for some animal bones.
Yet, there may have been good reason why the FBI digs found nothing because the agents just might have been too late in getting to the scene. In 1983, detectives debriefed a mob associate who reported that around 1980 he was told to dig up a body in a basement at the request of Paul Vario. The corpse, the informant told the cops, was in the ground about ten years and was in a good state of preservation with skin intact. But once the body was lifted from the ground, the skin came off and it was all he could do to get the remains out and away in the nick of time before federal agents arrived with a warrant to do the digging, the informant said. The associate didn’t appear to identify the exact location, but the detectives believed he indicated, based on the sandy soil conditions, it was Robert’s Lounge.
The murders that followed in the wake of Burke and his crew didn’t seem to deter Vincent or his cousin Gaspare, who by 1968 were hanging out at Robert’s Lounge with regularity. It was a dive that drew the mob crowd of wannabe gangsters and those who would eventually make it into the ranks of made men. An NYPD intelligence document from 1971 and based on a source said to be “reliable and confidential” said the lounge was a hangout for “the top men connected with gambling, loansharking and hijacking.” Raised in an orphanage, Burke eventually as a young man became a bricklayer but gravitated to crime, working as a bookmaker and dabbling in loansharking, things he became very adept at. He also developed a reputation for beating recalcitrant debtors but later hit upon the idea of forgiving all or part of what was owed in exchange for information about cargo shipments and truck deliveries—prime targets for hijacking.
Burke was known as “The Gent” because of his smooth style and charisma. Back in the 1930s Jimmy Cagney starred in a film known as Jimmy the Gent in which he played a city guy involved in the “missing heir” racket, a business of finding unknown or missing heirs to valuable estates. In Burke’s case, the ironic twist was that he got involved with many things to make money—usually stolen—and the people with whom he was involved would often go missing permanently.
In the Mafia life, Burke was with Paul Vario, a Brooklyn Mafioso from the Flatlands section. The relationship meant that Burke had the protection of Vario and access to his network of crooked cops and shady businessmen. In return, Burke passed along a share of the proceeds of his crimes to Vario and kept him informed of any big scores or problems that needed to be worked out. Burke was an earner for the mob, and other Mafiosi would try to work with him and in such cases things would have to be worked out with Vario. When he needed to, Vario could also turn to Burke and his associates at Robert’s Lounge to put together hit teams to kill rival hijackers or those suspected of being informants.
A born and bred Brooklyn guy, Vario didn’t l
ike to stray too far from his home borough. It was a short trip from his junkyard in south Brooklyn and his own bar known as Geffken’s at 9508 Flatlands Avenue to Burke’s lounge in a three-story brick building on Lefferts. Vario, a big, burly man, was blooded to the Lucchese crime family and in the days after the death of family namesake Thomas Lucchese in 1967 of natural causes, the family was led by Carmine Tramunti.
Known as “Mr. Gribbs,” Tramunti was a Neopolitan-born gangster and drug dealer who earned his reputation as a strong arm for the likes of labor racketeer John “Johnny Dio” Dioguardi. Fleshy faced and often photographed with a scowl on his visage, Tramunti didn’t have the polish or prestige of Lucchese, who was of a different generation of older Mafiosi. But investigators were certain Tramunti was following in the footsteps of Lucchese by having some political district leaders of both the Republican and Democratic parties under his control, as well as at least one judge. Those were connections that would prove useful over the years. He also had the muscle and blessing of the Commission to take over the family. Both Tramunti and Vario had one common connection in business: they had legitimate floral shops. But if Vario steered clear of Big City night life, Tramunti was considered by police to be a major hidden investor for the Mob in bars and restaurants all over town. He also invested in heroin, something that would lead to his undoing.
While he was linked to a different crime family than that of Vario and Burke, Vincent Asaro and his father had no problems circulating among those in the Lucchese circles. Mafia men weren’t barred from hanging out with other wise guys from different families. It was just that any business deals had to be worked out by the higher-ups in the borgatas. In Vincent’s case his immediate boss wasn’t his father but rather his uncle Mickey Zaffarano, a captain in the Bonanno family and the king of the Times Square peep shows and porn industry. The Asaros had an interest in a junkyard near Fountain Avenue in East New York, not far from Burke’s lounge, and when junk cars had to be disposed of Burke only had to reach out to the Asaros.
In June 2013, the likes of Jimmy Burke, Paul Vario, and just about everybody else who frequented Robert’s Lounge back in the day were gone. Jerome Asaro had succumbed to a heart ailment. Burke and Vario had already died in prison and DeSimone and Sepe either disappeared or were found murdered. Zaffarano was also long gone, having dropped dead of a heart attack during an FBI raid in Times Square. The Bonanno family itself had been carpet bombed by numerous federal prosecutions, with many of the old timers dead, in prison, or, like Joseph Massino, cooperating with the FBI. Only a few of the old men like Vincent were among the last dinosaurs still standing.
Vincent Asaro and cousin Gaspare Valenti were still around on the street and their worlds were very circumscribed. Gaspare wasn’t his own man, secretly working for the government and trying to stay afloat financially. Vincent acted and sounded like a busted valise, a shell of what he once was. If there had been big money in the mob, it had flown out of his hands as fast as he got it. His jewelry had been hocked for cash years earlier. He couldn’t go to old social clubs run by the wise guys because he couldn’t pay his dues. So he stayed home
“I don’t come out early no more,” said Asaro. “Where am I going? I got no place to go.”
Asaro wasn’t a hermit. He still took lunch at the Esquire and would meet other aging Mafiosi at places like the Tuscany Deli in Lindenwood where he could sit outside as he bemoaned his misfortune. He still liked to fish and once in a while reeled in a nice flounder or fluke, which he cooked himself, perhaps with a side of orzo.
Without much money, Asaro had to be content with growing old, something he couldn’t do gracefully. He felt detached from the Mafia life, marginalized and adrift. He didn’t know what was going on among the families. When on Thanksgiving Day in 2011, Salvatore Montagna, the Brooklyn ironworker who took over the Bonanno family, was killed in Canada, Asaro didn’t have a clue about that or just about anything else.
“I don’t even know what is going on in Ozone Park,” he told Valenti after news of Montagna’s murder hit the newspapers.
Part of the reason Asaro was so out of the loop in the Mafia was that his amigos in the life didn’t know what to make of him or maybe were just too uncomfortable around him. Talking over coffee one day at a diner on Long Island, Anthony Urso, a gangster who for a time ran the street business of the Bonanno family, minced no words when asked about Asaro.
“He’s a fucking lunatic,” said Urso.
At least in the 1990s Asaro was a guy right in the middle of things in his role as a crime family captain. When then-Bonanno boss Joseph Massino was released from prison about 1992 following a federal labor racketeering arrest, his consiglieri Anthony Spero and underboss Salvatore Vitale called a meeting of all the captains at a spot in Queens. Former boss Philip Rastelli had died in 1991 after spending years fighting various indictments and spending most of his time in jail. Massino wasn’t in attendance because he was on supervised release from prison and if he was spotted at the meeting by the FBI in such company, the government would send him right back to a cell.
The meeting was a big one. All of the big captains were present: Louis “Ha Ha” Attanasio, Anthony “Tony Green” Urso, Joe “Desi” DeSimone, Gerlando “George From Canada” Sciascia, and Louis Restivo, the only one of the group with a college education. Vincent Asaro rounded out the group. Spero told all of the captains that Massino wanted them to step down and await reappointment by Massino after he finished his supervised release period. Massino likely did that so he could see how each of the captains reacted and how they behaved during this transition period. Asaro and the others complied—they had no real choice in the matter. After Massino finished up his supervision period, he began meeting with the Bonanno captains, usually in small groups.
Vincent Asaro remained in the good graces of Joe Massino until sometime in the mid-1990s when things started to go sour, according to intelligence developed by the FBI. Being a captain in the Mafia usually works out to be a good position for those who have it. But Massino would later tell his FBI handlers that Asaro started to abuse the men under him and allegedly steal their money. Massino also is said to have noticed Vincent’s volatility, which included everything from fighting to cursing a blue streak in public. Such conduct was enough to have Massino demote Asaro to the rank of soldier, taking his men away from him.
The later years had not been kind to Asaro, and when 2014 rolled around things suddenly got much worse for the rapidly aging man. The morning of January 23, FBI agents fanned out from their headquarters building in lower Manhattan and in the early hours knocked on the doors of five men to unceremoniously arrest them for assorted crimes. Pulled out of his girlfriend Michele’s home in Ozone Park was Vincent. Given a few minutes by Special Agent Adam Mininni and the rest of the raid team to freshen up, Asaro was taken from the house in a heavy dark sweat suit and athletic shoes. He took with him a pair of tinted sunglasses. The agents took his cell phone to analyze later.
Asaro was taken from Queens to the FBI offices at 26 Federal Plaza where he went through the ritual of having his mugshot taken and was fingerprinted. Then, he and the other four men arrested that day—Thomas DiFiore, Jack Bonventre, John Ragano, and Vincent’s son Jerome—were led out of the building for the perp walk so that news photographers could have a field day. Vincent, handcuffed in the front, was led out by Robert Ypelaar and other agents, each of whom firmly held him by his arms. Cold and old, Vincent appeared gaunt and worried. His mind raced back to the days at Robert’s Lounge and all of those conversations he had with Gaspare, especially the last one on June 17, 2013, as Paul Katz’s bones were being dusted in the basement and he was no doubt aware that he might be in deep trouble.
The news release put out that day hit New York like a bombshell: “Bonnano Family Captain Vincent Asaro Indicted for Participation in The 1978 $5 Million Robbery at JFK Airport and The Murder of Paul Katz Who Disappeared in 1969.” Although five men had been charged, only Vincent faced the most
sensational allegations about participation in the Lufthansa heist. He and his son were also charged in connection with the murder of Katz. If proven, those charges guaranteed a life sentence for Vincent.
For Steve Carbone, the retired FBI agent who investigated the Lufthansa case in 1979, his reaction was mixed. He knew of the renewed interest in the case and actually had been debriefed by the new team of agents.
“I knew there were a lot of stones unturned,” Carbone said later. But with Asaro being thrown in the mix, Carbone said he felt a slight sting and a hurt feeling that “maybe I had failed.”
For a generation unfamiliar with Lufthansa, Brooklyn U.S. Attorney Loretta Lynch laid out for the media the old story that had become part of the folklore of American crime.
“Asaro helped pull off the 1978 Lufthansa robbery—still the largest robbery in New York history,” said Lynch in a statement. “Neither age nor time dimmed Asaro’s ruthless ways, as he continued to order violence to carry out mob business in recent months.”
Lynch’s latter remarks referred to the other charges in the indictment, easily overlooked given the sensational nature of the Lufthansa charges, that Asaro had been involved in various extortions and armed robberies, as well as a solicitation to have a suspected informant murdered before he could testify at the trial of another Bonanno crime family member for fraud. But those counts in the indictment almost seemed like afterthoughts, given what had surfaced about the Lufthansa robbery, the size of which the government slightly underestimated with its loss figure of $5 million.
“Asaro himself was in on one of the most notorious heists—the Lufthansa robbery in 1978,” New York FBI assistant director-in-charge George Venizelos told the media. “It may be decades later, but the FBI’s determination to investigate and bring wiseguys to justice will never waver.”
The Big Heist Page 4
